Save the NHS
‘Save the NHS’ has become something of a religious refrain. But given that Britain sits at the bottom of the global league table for cancer survival rates, rather than save the NHS, should we not be asking ourselves if we should be saved from it?
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Government expenditure on the NHS has risen from 7.7% of total public spending in the mid-1950s to 17.9% in 2018-19. To put the NHS on this interminable life support is to provide it with a level of care which it doesn’t even provide its most piteous of patients. Despite the NHS’ best efforts to silence critics of the Liverpool ‘Care’ Pathway – a name erroneous almost to the point of satire – in 2012, Professor Patrick Pullicin informed the Royal Society of Medicine that doctors were using the LCP as a ‘death pathway’ to euthanise the elderly and free up beds. Even claiming it was used on patients who weren’t terminally ill – or at least wouldn’t have been had they not been caringly deprived of fluids.
Throughout the Covid pandemic, the NHS received the kind of adulation usually reserved for popes or despots. There was something of the North Korean regime about how houses up and down the country gave their unswerving allegiance to what is, let us not forget, a government institution. In 2020, while many cancer patients were denied treatment, TikTok was replete with ‘overburdened’ nurses dancing inane routines in the PPE equipment which they claimed to be deprived from – great optics. Not.
And then there was the deranged call to prayer that was ‘Clap for Our Carers’ which saw scores of people bang instruments together with a kind of walleyed wonder. Why was there not a clap for our supermarket workers? Though considerably less well paid than nurses, supermarket staff put themselves at perhaps an even greater risk of contracting covid, yet I don’t recall their plight ever being memorialised in a Banksy mural.
Given that a rainbow is an optical illusion, it seems fitting that it was adopted as an NHS symbol. Behind the lurid coloured illusion of tolerance and acceptance lies an institution now proven to be both unaccountable and unscrupulous in equal measure. DNR notices were given, not only to elderly Covid patients, but also to those with learning difficulties – there’s a name for that: eugenics.
Envy of the world? I’m not sure it’s even the envy of the third one. Though, out of all the healthcare systems in the developed world , the NHS is officially the worst. Rather than save it, is it not high time we pulled the life support from this outmoded model of healthcare?